Affordable Care Act Scene 2 - Insurance Premiums

Cardinal_Fang
Mon, 10 Nov 2014 17:54:52 +0000

If the Court does overturn the subsidies for people on the federal exchange, then most of the people who are now subsidized will be exempt from the individual mandate because they will be deemed not to be able to afford insurance. But this case does nothing to remove guaranteed issue, so that anyone who wants to buy insurance will be still able to buy it, and all people of the same age will be charged the same price for particular plan, no matter their state of health.

So we can expect that formerly subsidized people who are healthy will not buy insurance; they won’t be able to afford it. But people who are sick will continue to want insurance, since buying insurance will be cheaper for them than getting their needed treatment without insurance.

Recall that under the ACA, individual policies bought on the exchange and individual policies bought off the exchange are in the same risk pool. If the Court overturns subsidies, we should expect that individual insurance policies will increase sharply in price, as healthy people flee the risk pool and sick people remain.